Agenda Newsletter - May 10, 2007

One of her generation’s leading painterly lights, the 31-year-old Schutz works in multiple directions at once. Here she spreads her wings with pictures of people dancing and riding in cars and portraits with holes cut in the canvases. Don’t miss How We Cured the Plague (above), which features some sort of ambisexual golem hooked up to an IV unit connected to a shark. Say hello to the human animal.

Hugh Grant redeems himself on DVD
Music & Lyrics

The thousandth time must've been the charm: Hugh Grant’s latest theoretically charismatic narcissist, the washed-up lesser half of an eighties pop group, might be the best argument for the guy’s career yet. (Maybe co-star Drew Barrymore—forever klutzy, bubbly, and lovable—rubbed off on him.) Grant plays the over-the-hill beefcake as only he can: as a hair-tousling fop feigning embarrassment while believing that his every flaw is a secret virtue. We’re not embarrassed to admit we love it.

Cary Curran says she’s a fag hag, but it’s hard to imagine this potty-mouthed blonde playing second fiddle to anyone—even if her co-writer is Mike Albo, the gay epigrammatist of the moment. The raunchy, multimedia-theater vet’s new one-woman show, which runs for just three weeks, will chart her transition from Christian adolescent to, well, fag hag, using everything from video to original song: She’ll dance! She’ll sing! She’ll wear a hot-dog costume!

Don’t get us wrong: We love television. (It’s got all the reality we need.) But the whip-smart argument David Joselit tenders in his new book, Feedback: Television Against Democracy, has us chafing against the couch. In a sound bite: Modern-day TV’s almost perfectly insulated corporate structure has rendered the medium completely undemocratic. But tonight, you should also expect to hear about wily activists and performance artists who have subverted the system. You’d rather watch Seinfeld?

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French Institute's Cultural and Culinary Events
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This seventeen-year-survey features more than three dozen offhand color photos of the nitty-gritty realities of everyday life in New York—plus nudity. In addition to having a poet’s touch for capturing such things as newsstands and laundromats, Landers also has a wily ability to get young women on the street to reveal naughty, and disconcertingly tender, bits of flesh—one woman has her top pulled down as she examines fruit in a deli.

In collaboration with award-winning director (and once-upon-a-time architect) Christine Poler, Denmark’s Gruppe 38 is demonstrating what London’s Old Vic proved a few years ago when it brought Grimm Tales to a sold-out New Victory Theater: Some of the best theater for kids is abstract, ultrasophisticated—and rewarding for practically all ages. Children under 5 should see Songs From Above; tweens, Elephant and Crocodile.